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Can Color Code help an aspiring college student find the “best-fit” major?
The short answer—YES.
The more complicated answer—it will help, but it will not tell you exactly what to study.
So… How can it help?
There is an important concept in interviewing and hiring the best person for a job; it’s called motivational fit. The idea of motivational fit is that the best-fit candidate will have a natural motivation to do the type of work required for a job.
A common question to determine motivational fit is, “Tell me about your ideal workday.”
The candidate might respond:
“I’d like to have flexibility to work remotely from home, or in the office. I like to focus and work hard without interruption; I can produce high-quality work at high volumes that way. I like analyzing information to find useful insights. I feel that I’m really good at that, and I feel like finding the insights is a rewarding challenge. I find it really enjoyable. Send me the spreadsheets all day!!! I also like to get up and take walks by myself between projects to get refreshed, so I’d like to not be bound by a rigid schedule; I don’t mind having a heavy workload, I just want flexibility in managing that workload.”
This candidate, likely a White type, might be a good motivational fit for a data-analyst in a software sales company who identifies profit margin strengths and weaknesses and writes reports about them. But they might be a poor motivational fit for an accounting business partner, who has to respond to business leaders across the organization to help them manage their budgets; a Red-type might be a better motivational fit for this.
This same idea of motivational fit can be applied to a person in college trying to determine their major.
As a college student, you have the opportunity to talk with advisors in each department when trying to pick your major. Have some solid “motivational-fit questions” ready to ask. Your questions should get at the things that matter to your Core Motive—typical work style, amount of collaboration, exposure to risk in various forms, level and type of pressure, work environment factors such as interruptions, customer exposure, predictability…
Here’s a list to get you going:
Imagine asking the above questions; the answers you get should be referenceable to what you can learn from Color Code.
You might hear, “detail-oriented” and “high degree of accuracy.” This would indicate a better fit for Blues and Whites and a poorer fit for Reds and Yellows.
You might hear, “decisive and fast-paced.” This would align more with Reds and Yellows, but maybe mostly Reds.
You might hear, “There’s a lot of flexibility and room to create your own path in this type of work.” That would be great for a Yellow or a White type.
So, let’s go back to the original question: Can Color Code help an aspiring college student find the “best-fit” major?
Yes, it can, but the real answer is that it’s less about the major and more about the work afterward. When you have the conversations with those department advisors, ask them about the jobs that a degree works toward. Pick a major that aligns with both something that interests you and your Primary Core Motive. And if you can’t find something that really sparks a deep interest, pick something to explore that aligns with your Primary Core Motive. At least there, you know that you’ll have a natural motivational and behavioral fit.
Most importantly, don’t let your Color Code type tell you what you can’t do—instead, let it be a piece of the puzzle that helps you find your fit. Color Code can inform, but it doesn’t need to determine. You get to use your whole self when finding your future.
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Derek Pangelinan is the owner of Derek Rey Consulting, a workplace-culture and leadership development company. He has been teaching Color Code for nine years and has taught teams in large and small organizations, for-profit and nonprofit, and has used it as a coaching tool. You can reach out to Derek at his business email address: Derek@DerekReyConsulting.com
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Super insight for identifying our place in future aspects of life. Though not to be used as a rock solid solution to this identification of suitable aspirations, you have shown how valuable it is to understand our DCM as a strong player in making better choices for our future chosen roles in life.